Herein, related art may be discussed to put the invention in context. Related art labeled “prior art” is admitted prior art; related art not labeled “prior art” is not admitted prior art.
Servers, e.g., web servers, database servers, are computers that provide services to other computers. Some servers can be partitioned to run multiple software workloads. License fees for server software are often based on the hardware resources available to run the software. Thus, the fees for running software restricted to an 8-CPU partition of a 32-CPU server can be much less than the fees for software permitted to run on the full system.
While early partitioning technology required manual intervention to change a partition's hardware resources, virtualization and other technologies provide for software-controlled reallocation of hardware resources between partitions of a server. This means that restricting software to a partition does not restrict it to a fixed amount of resources. Accordingly, software licenses may have to provide for the maximum number of resources that can be allocated to a partition, which can lead to wasteful over-provisioning on the licensee's part. As is apparent from the detailed description below with reference to the following drawing, the present invention addresses the problem of license over-provisioning in servers that allow software-controlled reallocation of resources to partitions.